Making meaning through movement : hiking the Cathar Trail in the south of France : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Captions to the following figures have been altered since thesis submission to include permissions statements in accordance with copyright: figures 2.9 (p. 50), 5.2 (p. 129), 5.3 (p. 130)Redacted from thesis due to copyright reasons: pp. 343–344: Appendix 3: Lyrics Reproduction of lyrics taken from: Crombé Debatte, J. 2013 [1946]. ‘Automne’. In: Profos-Sulzer, E. (ed.). Chansons populaires de France, de Suisse, de Belgique et du Canada. Stuttgart: Reclam. Pp. 21–22.Listed in 2017 Dean's List of Exceptional ThesesThis thesis explores how meaning is formed through movement. It argues that the way in which hikers perceive, experience and make sense of their environment is contingent on their movement. Specifically, it explores walkers’ lived experiences and perceptions of their environments on a long-distance hiking trail. The thesis is based on participant observation on the Cathar Trail in the south of France in 2013 and on archival research. The Cathar Trail lends itself to such an investigation because it invites visitors who are intent on hiking and on the history of the Cathars, a persecuted thirteenth-century religious minority. To interrelate processes of interpretation and interaction in an anthropological perspective, I adopt a phenomenological approach and Ingold’s (2000a) ecological approach to human-environment interaction in combination with interdisciplinary and interpretative approaches. The thesis situates hikers’ journeys in socio-political and geographical contexts by deconstructing the twentieth-century historical narratives, heritage discourses and sites (ruined fortresses) which are the basis of the Trail. I then show that hikers came to know the Trail through their physical engagement with their environments. To highlight that walkers’ environment-related movement was constitutive of their sense of place, I propose the holistic concept of terroir as an alternative to ‘landscape’. My discussion of wayfinding demonstrates that hikers made their own way, shaped by movement, topography, sensory perception, technologies and other hikers. I show that walking the Cathar Trail produces a knowledge particular to people’s bodily movement along a path and to histories. Crucially, I develop the theory of a hiking spatiality which is generated by, and specific to, hikers’ movement along the Trail. Locally specific but encompassing in its scope, the thesis seeks a common ground in movement. Throughout, I use photographs to engage the reader through intimated and intuited bodily experience. Interweaving epistemology and methodology, the thesis is at one and the same time about meaningmaking in movement and is in itself a form of knowledge formed from movement (in particular through the employed ‘walking-with’ method) according to a research agenda

Open access to scholarly communications: advantages, policy and advocacy

The Open Access (OA) movement regards OA modes of disseminating research as the unequivocal future of scholarly communication. Proponents of the open access movement itself have, over the last ten years, carried out systematic research to show how OA can tangibly benefit researchers, institutions and society at large. Even so, the number of research papers being uploaded to OA institutional repositories remains relatively low, frequently based on concerns which often contradict the facts. Policies for OA have been introduced to encourage author uptake, and these are also discussed here. Briefly delineating aspects of these phenomena, this paper will then move on to outline and discuss advocacy for OA in organisations, and whether this should be “downstream”, in the form of informational campaigns, or “upstream”, in the form of top-down change management. This paper seeks to make a contribution to these issues in the OA sphere, by brining into the debate strands from the literature of the sociology of science and management science that will hopefully elucidate aspects of author reactions to OA, and the perceived changes that its adoption gives rise to

Introduction: unmarried and unknown: urban men and women in the low countries since the early modern period

This essay introduces a special issue on The Lure of the City that examines the attraction of towns to unmarried men and women in the Low Countries during the early modern period and the nineteenth century. The issue has the relation between singles and cities as its main focus. Singles were present in disproportionately large numbers in urban areas, but the question is why? This essay sets out the historiographical framework for the contributions in the issue, discusses the sources and methodologies used, and provides a brief overview of the evolution of singleness in the Low Countries. The contributions all demonstrate the relevance of a comparative approach. It is revealed that towns and cities not only attracted but also created singles, that they offered different opportunities for different groups of unmarried people and that they affected men and women differently. Finally, it appears that not every town and city was attractive to men and women without a spouse

Self-Organized Supercriticality and Oscillations in Networks of Stochastic Spiking Neurons

Networks of stochastic spiking neurons are interesting models in the area of Theoretical Neuroscience, presenting both continuous and discontinuous phase transitions. Here we study fully connected networks analytically, numerically and by computational simulations. The neurons have dynamic gains that enable the network to converge to a stationary slightly supercritical state (self-organized supercriticality or SOSC) in the presence of the continuous transition. We show that SOSC, which presents power laws for neuronal avalanches plus some large events, is robust as a function of the main parameter of the neuronal gain dynamics. We discuss the possible applications of the idea of SOSC to biological phenomena like epilepsy and dragon king avalanches. We also find that neuronal gains can produce collective oscillations that coexists with neuronal avalanches, with frequencies compatible with characteristic brain rhythms.Comment: 16 pages, 16 figures divided into 7 figures in the articl

Politeness and bias in dialogue summarization: two exploratory studies

In this chapter, two empirical pilot studies on the role of politeness in dialogue summarization are described. In these studies, a collection of four dialogues was used. Each dialogue was automatically generated by the NECA system and the politeness of the dialogue participants was systematically manipulated. Subjects were divided into groups who had to summarize the dialogues from a particular dialogue participant’s point of view or the point of view of an impartial observer. In the first study, there were no other constraints. In the second study, the summarizers were restricted to summaries whose length did not exceed 10% of the number of words in the dialogue that was being summarized. Amongst other things, it was found that the politeness of the interaction is included more often in summaries of dialogues that deviate from what would be considered normal or unmarked. A comparison of the results of the two studies suggests that the extent to which politeness is reported is not affected by how long a summary is allowed to be. It was also found that the point of view of the summarizer influences which information is included in the summary and how it is presented. This finding did not seem to be affected by the constraint in our second study on the summary length

Creating a more fair and equitable society starts with us

Ariadne Gorring, Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity with Melbourne University, will share her experience of the Atlantic Fellowship program and explore what it means to be a social change leader in these times of uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Together we’ll discover what we bring to the table that enables or hinders change and reflect on what it means to empower voice, treaty and truth in a way that unites us with ourselves and others as a pathway towards a healed nation

Semilinear elliptic equations in thin regions with terms concentrating on oscillatory boundaries

In this work we study the behavior of a family of solutions of a semilinear elliptic equation, with homogeneous Neumann boundary condition, posed in a two-dimensional oscillating thin region with reaction terms concentrated in a neighborhood of the oscillatory boundary. Our main result is concerned with the upper and lower semicontinuity of the set of solutions. We show that the solutions of our perturbed equation can be approximated with ones of a one-dimensional equation, which also captures the effects of all relevant physical processes that take place in the original problem

Supporting Safer Spaces: How School Administrators Shape the School Culture for Sexual and Gender Minority Students

This review highlights gaps in existing literature concerning how sexual and gender minority (SGM) students can be best supported at school, as influenced by school administration. SGM students experience additional challenges to their gender normative, heterosexual peers that affect their physical, mental, and social well-being. Student groups which support SGM youth such as Gay-Straight or Gender-Sexuality Alliances (GSAs) have a positive impact on students’ sense of belonging and a school’s overall climate compared to schools without similar groups. School climate is also influenced by school leaders through policy interpretation, resource allocation, and their individual leadership practices. Research shows that support from school administrators for SGM students is crucial for teachers to initiate more inclusion of this at-risk group. Existing research does not provide sufficient insight into the complex task of leading a school while fostering a sense of belonging for SGM students; my research aims to fill this gap